Hungary, part 1

For the next four weeks, starting today (Monday), I’m going to be studying Hungarian at the University of Pécs, on a scholarship provided by the Tempus Foundation (https://tka.hu/english). This is not my first time with this program — I attended last year as well, on the same sort of scholarship, and thus most of what we’re doing this year is fairly familiar: I know most of the teachers, many students have been coming for more than one year, and I can get from the dormitories to the building where we have our classes without getting lost.

There isn’t all that much to say about how the program is going at this point, since we’ve only had one day of classes (and not even a full day at that), but they seem to have fixed some of the more annoying issues from last year — for instance, we no longer have to walk far, far away from the university to eat lunch (last year lunch was served in a restaurant that was maybe a 10-minute walk from the main class building), and they’ve made it easier to choose between vegetarian and meat lunch options on a day-by-day basis, rather than having to simply elect one for the duration of the program.

I was originally placed into a class that in my opinion was far too easy, but switching to a higher-level class for a few sessions to try it out was extremely easy. Although I feel a little bit behind in the higher-level class, I will probably end up staying there if they let me, since I tend to do best at language learning when I can just jump off the deep end and start talking to people who know the language better than I do.

I unfortunately can’t promise that I’ll write about this program with any regularity, but I will try. Some future posts may be written in Hungarian, but I will include an English translation at the bottom.